kurt vonnegut said:
Well spoken Mr. MEEN Ag,
And allow me to reiterate that I do not wish for it to seem that I am throwing stones from my own glass house.
side note - is MEEN a reference to your chosen undergraduate field of study?
Oh no you're fine. This is a good discussion.
And yes, I did my undegrad and masters at A&M in mechanical engineering. I TA'd the engineering ethics course while I was in grad school. I usually try to guide the morality discussion I participate on this board to meet the recitation standards from when I was a TA. There's a lot of overlap between leading 25 hard headed engineering students through messy, unclear morality discussions that don't have an answer in the back of the book to how discussion happens on this board.
That being said, I don't hold myself to be even a decent philosopher (or engineer for that matter). Our team meetings consisted of being in a room full of philosophy phd students who could take any position on any subject and outclass the engineering grad students. They were basically lawyers navigating different moral frameworks to suit their needs. But they struggled to understand engineering risk and design. Everything was an easy teaching lesson, but they couldn't show the students what tools to use to head off future bad designs, future bad meetings, and future bad bosses. So there was room for everyone to humbly approach and learn more.
I'm sad now that the department of engineering is now no longer requiring that specific class to graduate. I view it as the most important course an engineer can take. You're going to forget thermo equations but those are easily looked up. Learning how to spot maliciously implied moral obligations (when someone uses the word should), walking through where moral authority comes from (its not a piece of paper that says professional code of ethics at the top), and how to defend your moral positions are life long lessons that are hard to self study.